Invented Terms, Neologisms, and Portmanteaus for Words That Aren't, But Should Be.

The spread of disease caused by people’s irrational and baseless skepticism over vaccination.

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Anti-vaccination is not an idea. It’s the opposite of an idea. It’s a fevered, irrational panic without merit, sense, or decency.

It is the worst kind of selfishness: the baseless refusal of data empirically gathered, analyzed, and proved, pared with the arrogant assumption that your right to be wrong supersedes everyone else’s right to not get sick.

Life is already hard enough – not only here, but for people all around the world for whom the relief and luxury of vaccination isn’t even possible. Millions of people get sick and they die because they lack the access and infrastructure to avail themselves to this technology you so thoughtlessly toss aside.

120 cases of Measles to date. Of a disease that was all but eradicated thanks to vaccination.

People with polydipsia have to be monitored constantly. If not, they’ll compulsively gulp and guzzle any fluid… drinking so much over and over they’ll essentially dilute themselves to death. Their body will fall into a terrible chemical imbalance, they’ll seize, their heart will stop, and they’ll die.

Because something in their mind can’t tell them when they’ve had enough.

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A piece of scandalous or otherwise inflammatory information that’s tossed quickly from one medium to another.

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I’ve held off on having an opinion about Lena Dunham for a while now.

My instinct, of course, was to roll my eyes and decry her every undertaking as yet another act in her campaign of precious hijinks and aggressively self-satisfied mediocrity. But that’s because I’m reactionary. And it’s also because that’s exactly what Lena Dunham wants. She wants a reaction. Desperately.

So I sidelined myself. I watched a season of Girls – decided that was enough. I read some of her writing – decided that wasn’t really worth my time. I saw her caper about in a Sia wig, and change her hairstyle, and talk about her shitty tattoos… and god, I read countless articles about how she’s not making a big deal about how big a fucking deal she’s making about how often she’s naked in her show.

And in the face of all of that data… I continued to ignore her.

And then yesterday happened.

Yesterday, I overheard a coworker talking about Lena Dunham and her sister’s vagina.

Naturally, I was curious.

So from that one overhearing, I went and spoke to another coworker who directed me to an online article which contained numerous tweets written by Dunham, in response to yet ANOTHER article published in the National Review of all places… the author of which had taken Dunham down for an essay she’d written in her bullshit $3 million book of essays about several times in her childhood when she poked, prodded, rubbed, examined and otherwise outsourced her own sexual curiosity to her infant sister’s genitalia.

Dunham wrote about it. Even invited the comparison to her and a pedophile. Then someone from the National Review wrote a takedown of her… and Dunham went to Twitter and 140 characters at a time lived up to my lowest expectations.

Now, clearly the subject of that story is interesting enough. But like I said – I don’t want to pay Dunham that much attention. (Capsule Review: If she actually were a pedophile, at least she’d be genuine. As it is, she’s neither. She’s an overblown, mediocre talent, paid $3 million to write a book of shallow, self-obsessed clickbait.)

Forget about Dunham for a sec, though… and let’s consider the weird odyssey that bit of information took to get from Lena Dunham to me.

Eavesdropping -> Conversation -> Gawker -> Twitter -> National Review -> Lena Dunham’s crappy book -> An event that took place over 20 years ago.

Something about that transmission of events is mind boggling to me.

How quickly that one event way back in the past was taken and molded and commercialized and essayed upon and criticized and tweeted and discussed and overheard. And now here I am… writing a word about it.

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Political conservatives’ psychotic obsession with their misperceived persecution and victimization at the hands of multiculturalism, economic equality, and public wellbeing.

LOOK AT HIS LITTLE WORRIED FLIPPERS!!! He’s so scared some foreign whale is going to come and upend his undeserved, inherited dominance over the ocean. With his guns and his moneypile and everything. Guh. He’s just so cute, I want to die.

Thanks to Chris Fernandez for the illustration. Ladies and gentlemen, if this guy were any more talented, we’d drive him toward self-destruction. Because he’s great and we’re awful and can’t have anything nice.

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Ebola outbreaks, beheadings, ISIS invading Syrian towns and killing people, yet another US military intervention in the Middle East, Ferguson, Russia, Crimea, the continued tensions in Ukraine, the shooting down of that passenger plane… Robin Williams’ suicide.

It’s easy to look at these things and think the world is falling apart. That is, until you look back at history and remember that 100 years ago WWI was ripping Europe apart, people were dying by the tens of thousands, massive epidemics were poised to decimate, and the whole of the world was tuning up for the bloody, suicidal carnival that would become the 20th century.

So it’s not that things are getting worse. It’s that they’ve always been a fucking nightmare.